The Musical as Drama

AABA is a trivial form—commonplace, found everywhere,
the sort of thing Hobson would have been ready to write off
when a musical surprised him with its depth. Some AABA
songs do run deep in our culture and become instantly recog-
nizable wherever you are. When Adele Astaire fell in love with
her cross-Atlantic aviator in Funny Face, it was an AABA for-
mat that they sang together (“S’Wonderful”). When Joe and
the black male chorus carried Show Boatbeyond its love-at-
first-sight routine to voice the despair and endurance of men
trapped in labor, it was an AABA format they sang together
(“Ol’ Man River”). The balcony scene for Tony and Maria was
AABA (“Tonight”). Anyone can make a list of AABA songs that
express American values of widely different kinds, but Sond-
heim works this structure out as a kind of ensemble triumph
for John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Leon Czolgosz,
John Hinckley, Charles Guiteau, Giuseppe Zangara, Samuel
Byck, Squeaky Fromme, and Sara Jane Moore, their one com-
mon element being the intention to assassinate an American
president, and in doing so he is throwing wealth and power off
balance.
Cassie seeing herself in the mirror in A Chorus Lineis seeing
herself as dancer dancing. This is the point of resistance that
throws power off balance. Zach doesn’t get it about Cassie. She
puts him off balance. When Louise sees herself in the mirror
in Gypsy, Mama Rose is put off balance. In the illegitimate the-
atre Kierkegaard finds variations of oneself when one is still
oneself, and this is actually staged in the mirror number of Fol-
lies, when the veteran showgirls dance in ensemble with their
younger selves. The discovery that the saddest woman in town
is myself, or that I am beautiful and a woman despite Mama’s
way of defining me, or that I am a dancer before I am Zach’s
woman—these look like psychological moments, but they ring
truest in their challenge to wealth and power, and that is the
challenge of having a surplus of identity which wealth and
power cannot fix in place. This is a political challenge.
Kierkegaard was not thinking politically when he sent Con-
stantine Constantius in search of repetition, nor are the mirror

198 CHAPTER EIGHT